Embodiments of the present disclosure relate to providing flexible reserve power for the power grid from distributed flexible resources while maintaining economy and stability of power requirement for the distributed flexible resources.
The power grid has several requirements for reserve power which are referred herein as ancillary services, and these include providing spinning reserves and non-spinning reserves, and ramping reserve, that are required to main power grid stability. These ancillary services have traditionally been only provided by conventional power plants. With the integration of renewable generation in the power grid, the requirements of ancillary services are also changing from a fixed demand (that could be met by conventional power plants) for a given time horizon to a flexible demand, due to the unpredictable nature of the renewable generation which needs to be balanced by the ancillary services, for maintaining the stability of the grid, as mentioned herein above.
The distributed flexible resources that include a combination of multiple loads and distributed energy sources have their own power requirements that need to be met. For example, a commercial building may have several loads to maintain a temperature of the building, and may include its own power generation unit (which is referred herein as a distributed energy resource) to support these load requirements.
Methods and systems for providing predictable reserve power from the distributed flexible resources for the power grid face issues related to predicting an economic and reliable solution without compromising the power requirements of these distributed flexible energy resources.